Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

H.M.S. "TERROR" LIFTED BY ICE

In 1824 Captain Lyon was sent out in the Griper to winter at Repulse Bay, and thence crossing the isthmus described by the Eskimos continue along to Franklin's Point Turnagain; but the Griper was nearly wrecked in Rowe's Welcome and did not reach Wager River. The discoveries of Ross led to the renewal of this attempt by Captain Back in the Terror in 1836. He was to go to Wager River or Repulse Bay, and then make his way into Prince Regent Inlet, and so west; but he became imprisoned in the ice off Cape Comfort during one of the severest winters known. Drifting up Frozen Strait amid most perilous experiences, the ship, lifted high above sea-level by pressure, lay at times almost horizontal. Once "they beheld," he says, "the strange and appalling spectacle of what may be fitly termed a submerged berg, fixed low down, with one end to the ship's side, while the other, with the purchase of a long lever advantageously placed at a right angle with the keel, was slowly rising towards the surface. Meanwhile, those who happened to be below, finding everything falling, rushed or clambered on deck, where they saw the ship on her beam-ends, with the lee boats touching the water, and felt that a few moments only trembled between them and eternity."

Day after day the Terror defied the persistent effort of the ice to smash her, but suffering much in almost every timber she withstood it sufficiently to keep together. For four months she was entirely out of water, and when at last she was free, Back wrapped her up as best he could, and brought her home with the water pouring into her so that the men were so wearied out that they could hardly have continued at the pumps another day; and he ran her ashore in Lough Swilly only just in time. Upwards of twenty feet of her keel, together with ten feet of the stern-post, were driven over more than three and a half feet on one side, leaving a frightful opening astern for the free ingress of water. The forefoot was entirely gone; numbers of bolts were either loosened or broken; and when, besides this, the strained and twisted state of the ship's frame was considered, there was not one on board who did not express astonishment that they had ever floated across the Atlantic.

The next attempt to complete the coast of the American mainland was made from the land, and at the cost of the Hudson's Bay Company. Really it was the expedition proposed by Simpson some five years before, of which he would have been the leader had he not been shot; and it was entrusted to the capable hands of Dr. John Rae.

After wintering at York Factory, Rae reached Repulse Bay with two boats, the Magnet and North Pole, on the 25th of July, 1846, and in his usual style started immediately across the chain of lakes and portages which make up the isthmus that now bears his name, launching his boats in the tidal water of Committee Bay on the 1st of August. Stopped by ice on the west side and then on the east he returned to Repulse Bay, where he built Fort Hope of stones and roofed it with sails, and lived in it through the winter on what he could shoot and catch, for many weeks venturing on only one meal a day. Outside the men kept themselves warm chiefly by building snow houses and playing football; inside, as the only fuel used was for cooking, the only thing they could do was to wrap themselves in furs, and trust to their natural heat in a temperature that ranged about zero.

FRACTURED STERN-POST OF H.M.S. "TERROR"

In April, with a couple of sledges, eight dogs, and five men, he crossed the isthmus again and went straightaway up the east side of Boothia to Ross's farthest south, thus completing that coast-line. Back he went to Fort Hope after a trip of nearly six hundred miles, to start again on the 12th of May up the west coast of the Melville Peninsula to Cape Ellice, which Parry had sighted from the strait on that side. And he was back once more at Fort Hope on the 9th of June. Thus the survey of the northern coast was complete with the exception of the gap between the Boothia isthmus, on the west side, and Castor and Pollux River of Dease and Simpson, which Rae in another famous effort from Repulse Bay was to link up later on.

When Rae reached Lord Mayor's Bay on the east coast of Boothia, Franklin, with the Erebus and Terror, was off its west coast in the same latitude. This was the reappearance of the Terror in the north. After Back's voyage she had been repaired to sail with the Erebus, under Sir James Clark Ross, when he discovered the South Magnetic Pole; and on their return the barques had been thoroughly overhauled and fitted with auxiliary screws, the first time that the screw propeller was used in Arctic work. Franklin was in the Erebus, the Terror being commanded by Francis R. M. Crozier as she had been in the Antarctic voyage. Crozier was one of Parry's men, he having been in the Fury in 1821 and in the Hecla on her two subsequent expeditions.